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Gifts and commodities

Gifts and commodities

Ryan Schram

Mills 169 (A26)

ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au

Monday, August 8, 2016

Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/3.1

Reciprocity and the system of total services

  • Mauss's theory of reciprocity as an obligation is one of the most influential theories of society.
  • The gift entails three obligations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.
  • The gift has obligations because societies are more than the some of their parts. A society consists of people who are interdependent on each other.
  • All societies in some way impose the three obligations of reciprocity on their members, even if they don't realize it.

This holistic model of a social system is also a very useful lens for understanding contemporary societies. This week, I'd like to develop these three ideas:

  • A social system creates separate spheres of exchange.
  • The spheres of exchange in one society determine how people understand new ways of exchange.
  • Many societies opt for 'develop-man' instead of 'development'.

Gifts have spirit

For Mauss, the Maori word hau means the “spirit of the thing given.” When someone gives a gift, they give part of themselves. “The hau wishes to return to its birthplace” (Mauss 2000 [1925]: 12).

What if...?

What if we lived in a world in which everything was a gift, and everything possessed a hau?

Spheres of exchange

Many societies organize objects into distinct, ranked spheres of exchange

  1. Women as wives
  2. Prestige items: brass rods, tugudu cloth, slaves
  3. Subsistence items: food, utensils, chickens, tools

Some things, like land, cannot be exchanged for anything, but are inherited.

Two points about spheres

  1. In spite of predictions to the contrary, money does not collapse all spheres into one market. Often money exchanges are placed in their own sphere.
  2. Western and “modern” societies think of themselves as being dominated by money, but if you think about it, these societies have spheres of exchange too, and worry about maintaining the boundaries between spheres.

Ongka redux

  • Has a bank account
  • Grows coffee
  • He has also said that cash-cropping and moka should coexist (Strathern and Stewart 2004, 133).

References

Andrae, Thomas. 2013. “Barks, Carl.” In Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman, volume 1, Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith, eds. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO.

Bohannan, Paul. 1955. “Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among the Tiv.” American Anthropologist, New Series, 57 (1): 60–70.

Marx, Karl. 1867. “Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labor-Power.” Capital, vol 1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm

Mauss, Marcel. 2000 [1925]. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela Stewart. 2004. Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future: The Duna People of Papua New Guinea. Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan.

Voltaire. 2006 [1759]. Candide. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19942/19942-h/19942-h.htm.

A guide to the unit

 
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